


we must love one another or die

by thermodynamicActivity (chlorinetrifluoride)



Series: The Collegestuck 'Verse [8]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Humanstuck, Multi, Police Brutality, Polyamory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-23
Updated: 2014-12-26
Packaged: 2018-03-02 23:17:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 3,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2829596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chlorinetrifluoride/pseuds/thermodynamicActivity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>before you became a teacher, you were an undergraduate at columbia university. you attended protests, screaming for justice, dreaming of a world devoid of discrimination. since you were a black man with a megaphone, the cops zeroed in on you like piranhas. but you never stopped believing in revolution. you loved your roommate even as he annoyed you. you loved a girl from your classics class who stood taller than you. they loved you, and each other. only love can drive out hate, that is what you told yourself.</p><p>drabbles from your young adulthood.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. october 1997 - accurate scholarship

**Author's Note:**

> Edit, 19 September 2015: After I wrote and posted a story within this 'verse called "Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme", in which I gave the ancestors human names, a reviewer also read "we must love one another or die", and suggested that replacing their titles with the names I had given them in PSRT might make the story better. I've also made minor edits on the in-universe dates of some of the occurences, in an effort to sync it with PSRT, and with another story I'm working on that takes place within this time frame.
> 
> In terms of names relevant to this story -  
> Krishna Vandayar = The Signless  
> Simon Cao = The Psiioniic  
> Yekaterina "Cat" Levin = The Disciple

you and your roommate, simon, are two years apart. you are a freshman, a prospective history major torn between minoring in sociology and minoring in philosophy. he is a junior, with a lisp so thick that he can't even pronounce his major - physics - properly.

after he graduates in 1999, and you graduate in 2001, both of you plan to go to graduate school for teaching, so you’ll be stuck with him for a while.

simon and his numbers, muttering nonsense about boltzmann in his sleep. you, poring over world history textbooks, lamenting the fact how you’ll one day have to teach these lies, commenting on how you entered school wishing to reform, but may ultimately become a cog in the machine.

when you rant about it, your roommate tells you to put a sock in it.

when you keep going, he threatens to shoot the sock directly into your mouth, using the functional the potato cannon he made for a mechanical engineering class.

grumbling, you stop talking. and you hate him, sometimes. this sapient skeleton, metabolism faster than usain bolt. a good breeze would send him clear across midtown.

this bastard, always flippant, always himself. you hate his disorganization, his collection of coffee cups he never feels like cleaning, the way he leaves his stuff strewn about the room, how some of it even migrated to your side. you’re sure it’s a passive-aggressive show of dominance, from a skinny boy from guangzhou - lisping and hiding behind his multi textbook, from a guy who lacks the spine to just punch you in the face and get it over with.

during fall break, simon takes a crash course in practical pharmacology by going out drinking and drugging with girls. you don’t like these girls. you don’t like drugs. you don’t care.

he's found a vice worse than drinking to entertain.

you tell yourself that you aren’t jealous of the women who hang off him like garments, and you, you almost believe it. you pray to deities in which you no longer believe, to no response, or avail.

god has never had time for you you.

simon's back again, rolling on ecstasy and studying for something that looks like it contains entirely too much math. only him.

he twitches and shakes and grins and the way he grins sends not unwanted tingles down your spine. the line between love and hate is skinnier than the asshole in the bed across the room.


	2. september 1998 - in an euphoric dream

yekaterina is soft but not weak, sweet yet spirited, and you love this, love her half-lidded expectant eyes. for being unafraid to demand what she wants. for creeping up on you in your classics class and asking you out for coffee. so that by the close of your first year of college, you’re lying on her bed, watching her closed eyes dart through a REM cycle.

wise fools, all of you.

an english major, sometimes she’ll whisper lines of poetry to you while you have sex, the rhythm of her voice rolling like an ocean.

and then afterwards, she’ll murmur poetry to herself, about errors and normal hearts. you recognize the lines, and what was once your call to revolution becomes something you associate with her.

cat is no distressed damsel. she snaps the stereotype over one knee and uses it for firewood. she needs no savior.

she does not look for you to put on the macho affectations expected of young men. does not mock you for losing some sort of genetic lottery, for being five foot six to her five foot ten.

when you and she are in bed, you’re the little spoon, and she murmurs warmth into your ear.

this girl you meet three nights a week, ostensibly to study, but usually for other purposes.

for her, you can be different. you can be silent and introspective.

you've grown accustomed to being an asshole to simon, but with cat, that isn’t an expectation. she lets you sag down onto her bed and rest, while she massages your head. you cook food for her, food your mother taught you how to cook when you were younger. you ask her about her classes, about her life.

you notice a hello kitty bookbag hanging in the window of a bodega while wandering washington heights and buy it for her without a second thought.

you like her smile. her green gaze, the color of spring. the way she listens to you talk about revolution, as if she believes in it too. you dig your guitar out of storage and write her sappy songs you'll never actually find the courage to play for her.

she memorizes you with her careful eyes, chatoyant in the darkness of her room. occasionally, she kills the mood with cat puns. but everyone has idiosyncrasies. you adore her.

she sits at her desk in her underwear, writing out an assignment for a literature class, sketching faces and expressions in the margins of her notes.

and you wish you were an artist like her. you wish you could draw the sleep-tangled curls of her hair, the little mischievous smile she seems to wear permanently, the way she bites her lower lip whenever she loses herself in thought.


	3. february 1999 - the lie of authority

you come back from the demonstration regarding the shooting of amadou diallo with a black eye, broken teeth, a nasty head whack, and an assortment of abrasions and bruises, unlocking the door with one hand so you can use the other to hold your head.

all from the NYPD. you were the brazen one with the megaphone, standing on a bunch of crates and leading chants, so of course they had to make an example of you.

cat and her roommate half-walk, half-carry you to your dorm room, after the police decide not to detain you.

you spit out an incisor onto the floor, blood pouring from your mouth as if you’ve just eaten some sort of red fruit.

simon takes one look at you, and flips all ten of his shits. he yells at you to walk to the medical center to get your injuries checked, insists that if you were stupid enough to get yourself into this situation, you can get yourself out. 

cat tries to calm him down to little avail. he stops shouting, but only because he's reached that speechless stage of furious. he tends to your injuries with what few first-aid supplies you keep in the bathroom. 

"i’m your roommate, not your mother, krishna. i’m not gonna hold your hand and walk you to the hothpital," he finally says.

once you return from the medical center, he doesn’t talk to you for three days. just buries himself in thermodynamics and pretends you don’t exist.

 

 


	4. march 1999 - into the ethical life

you are willing to face any punishment up to death for what you believe, but simon is not willing to watch.

cat smooths out the neverending feud between the two of you, invariably ends up lying on simon’s bed eating fritos and telling you two to shut the hell up.


	5. may 1999 - there is no such thing as the state

one time, you actually get arrested for protesting. more than once. possibly more times than you can count on one hand.

every time, simon bails you out with the paltry money he makes from tech support at the office of the registrar and curses you out all the way home, driving from lafayette street all the way back to morningside heights

"when the fuck are you going to thtop protethting?"

"when i no longer see the reason to."

he brakes hard at the next light, just so you - sitting in the back - will smack your face against his headrest.

"one day, krishna, you will actually get shot at one of thethe demonthtrationths. and when that happenth, who will i have left?"


	6. september 1999 - lest we should see where we are

there are no fireworks exploding behind your eyes when simon kisses you. no orchestra soundtrack swelling to crescendo. no fanfare.

just the two of you in each other's faces, finally too close for comfort.

he yanks you toward him by your tie so hard that he almost smacks your head against the fridge.

neither of you is particularly adept at this first base thing. technically, he is more adept than you are, but is far too nervous to show it. 

he tells you that he’d wanted to do that for months, and you curse him out gloriously, demanding to know why he did nothing months ago.


	7. december 1999 - but to be loved alone

you are not quite dating simon, similar to the way that you are not quite dating cat. 

from the rudimentary physics you’ve learned from living with a walking textbook, you figure this might be schrodinger’s relationship.

both existent and not.

one evening, you catch cat deep in thought, and, wrapping your arms around her shoulders, ask her what she might be thinking.

she looks over at simon, seated at his state of the art huge ass desktop computer, and smiles faintly.

when he turns to face you, curiosity aroused by your whispering, you gaze at him intently. at his mismatched eyes. heterochromia, they call it. one blue, and one brown.

he blinks at you, asks what the hell you two are talking about, whispering on your bed like high school girls talking shit.

"i was thinking," cat says, a little shaky. "i was thinking that a triangle is ultimately more balanced than a line, isn’t it?"

simon does nothing but stare for a while. not out of rejection, but out of shock.


	8. january 2000 - no one exists alone

sometimes, people are unaware of the empty spaces within them until someone finally comes along to fill them.

simon and cat, kissing each other tentatively. cat, who knows what she wants, teaching him what to do, giving him instructions, positioning his hands _just so_  on her waist. he brushes some hair out of her eyes.

you wouldn’t have minded only watching, but they come back to kiss you. cat with her deft little fingers that can unbutton half your shirt in under twenty seconds, able to multitask and kissing you all the while.

simon and the warmth of his chest on your back as he leans against you, teeth grazing your neck. his breath comes haltingly, nervously, and you gently push cat away, and turn to reassure him.

because the universe hates you, simon's glasses end up tangled in your afro.

were your skin a few shades lighter they’d see your embarrassed blush. he mutters words of apology, gaze floor-focused with shame.

and cat just laughs.

she plucks the glasses from your hair, puts them on your nightstand and kisses simon again, giggling into his mouth.


	9. march 2000 - a voice to undo the unfolded lie

you and simon take the 1 train uptown, holding hands and lost in your private world, until you hear a voice issuing from across the car.

"faggots."

you look around for the culprit. a white man so paunchy he may as well have swallowed a basketball.

"you heard me, faggots."

you make to let go of simon's hand, but he won’t loosen his grip. he glares the man down.

at home, you shout at him. for once, you are the one telling someone to stop acting rebellious.

you go on tirades. you ask him what he would have done if the man had been armed. simon’s face doesn’t move. he says nothing.

"are you brain dead, you sack of shit?" you ask. 

"no," he says evenly. "i’m tired."

before you can ask, he reminds you of your last protest. your last arrest. you and several like-minded comrades screaming “out of the closets, into the streets”, while he sat in his room studying for linear algebra.

"i’m tired of living in the fear created by the sythtem," he says.

those are odd words for someone who has vehemently sworn to not give a shit about anything tangentially related to your social justice crusade, so you think he has to be messing with you.

then, you remember. you remember that you shouted that exact phrase, as your group marched down amsterdam avenue.

he must have committed it to memory.

he recites a few more lines of yours, and you manage a weak smile, while your heart does odd things in your chest. you think of cat, who takes notes on most of the things you say when you're given the floor at rallies, who has stood beside you and translated your words into ASL.

simon blinks at you. takes your hand. tells you what an idealistic asshole you are. how you’ve managed to get into his head. how a year ago he would have let go of your hand instantly. but now he's beginning to understand, and to agree, with reservations. 

"i hate that i do," he whispers. "but, krishna, i do believe in you."


	10. april 2000 - who can release them now

smoking in the dorms is forbidden. simon circumvents this rule by moving his desk so that it rests right next to the window, buying a fan, and setting it to exhaust so it blasts the cigarette smoke out of the room and into the night.

"you’re going to die of cancer one day if you keep that up," krishna says.

simon rolls his eyes.

"yeah, and you’re gonna get shot if you keep showing up to protethtth with a megaphone. big athth target thign on your back. at thith rate, only cat ith gonna make it to graduation."

simon makes a show of acting as if he needs nobody. hides behind his books and the glare of his desktop and the thermos of coffee he carries like a weapon against human interaction. because he knows the truth.

love is not kind. love is pain disguised as something less dangerous. invariably, the people you love will always leave. and krishna loves so freely that simon, who wants to know everything, cannot comprehend his roommate. but he thinks, he hopes, that if anyone can change the world, it’s the young man with the megaphone.

krishna should have come up in the sixties, when people dropped acid and exchanged flower crowns. not in an era that chews you up and spits you out. not here, in this greyscale city.

simon does not deserve this man and his unconditional positive regard. it unnerves him. the way his smile can knock him loopy for a bit. he did not mean to get this close to anyone. all he wanted to do was get laid every now and then, and graduate with honors. this thing with krishna and cat is collateral damage, and one of these days, it’s going to come crashing down like a house of cards.

still, he can’t help but hold onto it, for as long as he has it, which may not be very long. graduation will change everything. so for someone who spent two years opining the fact that he had to spend an extra year in undergrad, he's beginning to dread commencement.

"penny for your thoughts?" krishna asks, leaning against simon's computer chair so he can rest his head on the older man’s shoulder.

"why do you love me?"

the second the question comes out of his mouth, simon wishes he could take it back. it sounds so needy and pathetic and he just… why? why did he say that?

"why don’t i, more like," krishna replies. "you can be a self-destructive jerk, but you’re brilliant, you're wonderful, and you care. so here i am."

simon turns to look him in the eye, and there is not an ounce of jest there. he wishes cat were here. she’d crack some sort of pun about the “ameownt of affection” krishna holds for everyone, particularly her and simon, and then it would not feel so heavy, this feeling.

"you could do tho much better, though," simon insists. "i mean you have cat, and that’s like—"

krishna shooshes him.

"i have cat, and i have you. some things aren’t meant to be questioned."

but simon always questions. it’s practically a compulsion of his. signless pulls him out of the chair so the two of them are standing. they stare out the window, hands entwined. everything looks so small and delicate from the seventh floor. krishna presses a kiss to the shell of simon's ear.

"you’re going to drive yourself insane at this rate," krishna says, gently but seriously. "feelings aren’t logical. they aren’t supposed to make sense. you should know that, of all people."

"everything ith thuppothed to make thome kind of thenthe in the end."

krishna shakes his head.

"do put aside your analytical asshole tendencies, and just attempt to register an emotion without questioning its logical consistency for once," he snaps.

for krishna, for the short man with the unshakable convictions, simon tries. he really does.


	11. november 2000 - on fifty-second street

yekaterina attends demonstrations with her usual enthusiasm, eagerly waving the posters you make with a fervor that makes you smile. meanwhile simon stands there, holding a sign in one hand and a cigarette in the other, looking vaguely annoyed about the entire thing. then again, vague annoyance tends to be his default state. he believes in you, but it’s the middle of the winter, he is a skinny man with little natural insulation against the elements, and washington square park is colder than frosty the snow man’s frigid taint.

that last sentence was his exact words.

"thame shit, different year," he goes on.

this time, simon actually does end up getting beaten and arrested, because he did couldn’t handle watching you getting menaced by onlookers and police without doing anything. anything, in this case, involves trying to beat the living daylights out of a few people, most of them in navy blue. cat, who is capable of running faster than a cornered cat when shit heads south, eventually heads down to central booking to retrieve you. she makes a stop at bellevue so your injuries can be checked out, and then starts driving back to the dorms.

simon shouts at you all the way there.

"thee, if i hadn’t lithened to you, i wouldn’t have shoved that cop! and you know what they fucking did? they almotht involuntarily committed me, you fuck!"

"you made the conscious decision to resort to physical violence against an armed officer," you tell him, pompous douche mode fully activated in his opinion. "our demonstrations are meant to be nonviolent. but you reacted with blind fury, which was pointless, and dangerous."

simon wonders aloud as to what other type of fury he was supposed to react with when he couldn't see three feet in front of him due to the snow, and some assholes in navy blue were about to taze his significant other, or one of them anyway.

finally, he shouts, "thith ith thtill thomehow your fault!"

"yes, blaming me for institutional violence and police brutality is most definitely the right course of action," you respond. "i was not the one who hit you. i did not even ask you to come; you made that decision of your own volition."

"you came to my apartment, thaid you were going to a demonthration, and handed me a thign," simon points out. "technically you didn't athk but you came about ath clothe to it as humanly poththible."

he's still angry that he nearly got stuck in CPEP, that his wrist is broken, and that he has two sprained ribs. first off, his typing speed will be affected, and second off, everything hurts like hell.

cat, who is trying to navigate the volkswagen through the snowed out west side highway, and does not care to listen to your argument while she is driving, makes a noise between a groan and a growl.

"could you two stop fighting fur once and act like respawnsible adults? this gets us nowhere."

simon then mutters about how he wouldn’t have showed up to the goddamned protest in the first place if he felt like acting like a responsible adult, insults your indomitable idealism, and suggests that cat get her head examined if she thought following this idiot (you) was a good idea.

but cat, who has been stretched to her breaking point from worrying about the two of you and not sleeping for a night, slams on the breaks and shoots simon a glare that could melt the snow off the sides of the windshield.

"okay, listen, and listen close," she says, voice low and dangerous enough to make simon contemplate jumping out the passenger window and running for his life. shit, even you're getting secondhand fear from it. "i will punt you out of this car and you can either catch a bus or walk back to campus fur all i care if you make one more negative statement directed at me or krishna, got it?"

"okay, cat," simon says, ability to snark utterly demolished. "whatever you say."

you, who also have also been on the receiving end of cat's short temper before, shoosh her until her hands stop gripping the steering wheel with such fury.

"maybe i should get her a peathe offering of some thort?" simon suggests later, as you two sit in your room.  "what doeth she like bethideth uth, dead poetth, graffiti, and ballth of yarn?"

however, her anger at him evaporates within an hour or two. she cannot help but feel sorry for him. she skips her own graduate classes for the day, and holds him while he floats in his hydrocodone-induced haze, whispering reassurances about how everything will be worth it in the end. someone has to take a stand, she tells him.

she kisses his cast, and kisses the bandages on your face. she questions the decision she made to run.

"who the fuck would have picked uth up if you'd thtayed?" he points out.

"i suppose you're right."

you reread friere in the dying light of dusk, while the two of them sleep on your bed.


End file.
